Cacophony – an unpleasant combination of loud, often jarring, sounds.
Spot Conlon lived everyday through noise.
There was the noise of the people walking on the wobbly New York pavement. And the way they spoke down to him when they bought papers.
The noise of his voice turning hoarse from hawking the headlines.
The sound of horse's hooves and driver's clucks.
The shouts of his boys as they jumped off the dock.
The familiar sound of fists hitting faces and the squash as their noses broke.
The small whimper of the nightmare from Spot's trusted boys.
The battle cries as his newsies headed to borough battles.
The sound of bottles breaking from marbles launched by his trusted slingshot.
The sound of well paid whores, mingled with the sound of skin.
There was the sound of welcome summer rain, the sound of leaves crinkling as he made his way through a park, and the sound of his teeth chattering together from the freezing winter, like a dead man's bones.
All this noise every day leading to nothing; just a life that would move and move because this was New York City a place full of people like him. Living, breathing, and listening to the endless, empty motions of his life. He was a newsie and the King of Brooklyn but all of this meant nothing because he'd end up the same. Later in life, with a worthless factory job, an empty marriage and the only hope found in the bottom of bottles. It was a destiny even the King of Brooklyn couldn't avoid.
A life with more pointless cacophony but now a hopeless symphony of words passing through his head coming from his boss, his wife, and his friends.
The glug of a bottle at night.
The thump and rings of machines that he would run in a job that would lead nowhere.
There would be the cries of hungry child who were his but who he didn't even know.
All his life was ever going to be was a pointless never ending cacophony that hurt his ears and heart. That is if the notorious King of Brooklyn, Spot Conlon, had a heart. Which to him he didn't, because if he did he probably would have felt more pain for a bleak future.
But Spot Conlon did feel pain. He felt the pain when his best friend, Shocker, was killed. He felt the pain when a new lost boy came to him looking for hope that wasn't there. But all of this simply added to the noise. He was an empty shell who could barely feel the disappointment and pain of the emptiness he faced.
Until he meet her.